AnneMarie Mingo is an Associate Professor of Ethics, Culture, and Moral Leadership and Director of the Metro-Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her book, Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women's Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement expands understandings of virtue ethics and lived theologies of social movements.Her research interests include women in 20th/21st Century Black Freedom Struggles and theological/ethical influences on social movements.
Anna Marie Vigen is an Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Vigen's overall area of specialization is healthcare and medical ethics. In particular, she is interested in racial-ethnic and socio-economic inequalities in health and healthcare in the US and globally. Her method of study is interdisciplinary, drawing especially upon the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and theology. Her most recent book is titled, Women, Ethics, and Inequality in U.S. Healthcare: "To Count Among the Living." Her present project is on prenatal genetic testing and Christian ethics, which incorporates ethnographic interviews with genetic counselors.
Traci C. West is the James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School (NJ). Her teaching, research, and activism have focused on gender, racial, and sexuality justice, particularly related to gender violence. Her major publications include Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (2019), Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter (2006), and Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (1999), and editor, Our Family Values: Same-sex Marriage and Religion (2006).
Todd Whitmore is Associate Professor of Theology and Concurrent Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is
Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology, which is the first book in the T&T Clark Studies in Social Ethics, Ethnography and Theologies series. Currently Professor Whitmore’s work is local, where he serves as a Certified Addiction Peer Recovery Coach for persons with methamphetamine and opioid addictions in northern Indiana. His research asks how Christianity, race, and class work in the construction of public ideas of who counts as an addict.
James W. McCarty is Clinical Assistant Professor of Religion and Conflict Transformation and Director of the Tom Porter Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology. An interdisciplinary scholar with articles in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Journal of Law and Religion, Religion and Education, and Theology and Sexuality. He's co-editor of The Business of War: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Military-Industrial Complex and The B
Damaris Parsitau is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, History and Religious Studies at Egerton University in Kenya, where she teaches Religion and Development, Women Studies and Religion and Gender courses. She also serves as the Director of the Institute of Women, Gender and Development Studies. Dr. Parsitau has over twenty years’ experience in teaching, research, leadership training, advocacy, affirmative action, and mentorship. She is the founder and convener of the Kenya Women Rising, and the Youth and Transformational Leadership Development Programs, both leadership and mentorship incubation programs that invest in women and youth. A thought leader in girls’ education in Kenya, she is also the founder of Let Maasai Girls Learn, an initiative that seeks to rally global, regional, and local action for girls’ education throughout Maasailand in Kenya.
Christian Scharen is a practical theologian and current interim pastor at St. Lydia’s Dinner Church in Brooklyn, New York, Scharen was ordained a pastor in the ELCA in 2001. He holds the Ph.D. in religion from Emory University and has written or edited more that a dozen books and many articles, book chapters, and research reports on religious organizations, religion and culture, social justice, and theological education. His early work on theological ethnography helped spark an international movement bringing together sociology and theology in the study of the church. He is currently completing a volume on the Roots (of Tonight Show fame) and hip-hop as a prophetic art form, and a decolonial theological memoir about his family, the Ingalls family of The Little House on the Prairie series. He enjoys cooking, poetry, and music, especially learning to play on his grandfather’s 1910 Washburn bowl back mandolin. He has two adult children, Isaiah and Finn and a bulldog named Walt.
Natalie Wigg-Stevenson is an Associate Professor of Contextual Education and Theology at Emmanuel College (Victoria University at the University of Toronto). Her scholarly research is at the intersection of ethnography and theology. Natalie is the author of Ethnographic Theology: An Inquiry Into the Production of Theological Knowledge (Palgrave, 2014), a project that drew on her fieldwork in the Baptist church where she served as a minster. By rigorously outlining an ethnographic ethological method and demonstrating that method’s fruits with extensive constructive theological work in ecclesiology, social transformation, embodiment, sanctification and more, Ethnographic Theology opened new possibilities for what the nature and tasks of contemporary theology can be.
Her forthcoming work, Transgressive Devotion: Theology as Performance Art (SCM Press, 2021) pursues a radical agenda for connecting the historical Christian traditions to contemporary faith. Grounded in queer temporality theory, aesthetics, doctrine and performance art, it narrates a personal journey back and forth between doubt and faith through creative work with the affective theological structures animating both.
Natalie lives in Toronto with her husband Tyler and three daughters, Georgia, Héloïse and Evensong.
Photo credit: Michael Barker